by James Phelan
Heller eyed Hutchinson slowly. “No,” he eventually said.
“No what?”
“No, you can’t contact him.”
“A few questions about what was said in the safe house—”
“Leave Durant be. And that’s not a request.”
Hutchinson thought Heller looked uneasy but hid it well behind aggression.
“What if they’re still tight, him and Walker?” Hutchinson said. “What if they’re working together on something here, something well off reservation?”
“That’s not happening. This isn’t Hollywood.”
Hutchinson nodded.
“Something else?” Heller said.
“I’ve been hearing some rumors,” replied Hutchinson.
Heller laughed without humor. “Rumors? In Washington? No way . . .”
“I’m serious. Some serious rumors. Dangerous.”
“Rumors are dangerous.”
“Especially this one,” Hutchinson said, eyeballing Heller long enough to ensure he had the man’s complete attention. “It’s about the compound at Abbottabad, and the cell-phone numbers found on bin Laden.”
Heller was silent.
•
Walker hitched a truck ride to Frosinone, then within ten minutes was sitting in a van to Naples. The trip took around three hours, which was not much longer than he had planned by train. He walked small alleys and streets through the city, stopping to buy coffee and bottled water, which he drank on his way down to the edge of the Port of Naples. Out on the water, cargo ships, fishing boats and pleasure craft competed for space, colorful and chaotic, an explosion of noise and movement. Walker headed around the port, to the southeast, between the water and the rail tracks, looking for the guy he doubted had changed location since he had last seen him six months ago, out of desperation for funds and for new ID papers.
A criminal, and a useful one at that.
Leo Andretti liked to be considered a businessman. Well, he was all about commerce, and Walker had heard rumors about Andretti owning a legitimate cargo freighter that did a Sicily run.
Walker spotted Andretti by the water’s edge. He watched the Neapolitan carefully and he walked slowly, deliberately bringing himself into Andretti’s line of sight.
Andretti did a barely disguised double-take before letting out a low whistle. “Walker,” he said, not pleasantly. “A walking ghost.”
Walker gave him a smile, outstretched his hand. It was left hanging.
Andretti said, “You have nerve showing up here like this.”
“How’s that?” Walker said.
“You ran out on me.”
“No, I did what I promised,” Walker replied.
Andretti looked around, sucked his teeth. “You still owe me.”
“How’s that?” Walker said again.
“Tunisia.”
“I repaid that debt.”
“No. That was a blood debt.”
“So, I have to bleed for you?”
“Yes, that would do it.”
Walker gritted his teeth. “Andretti, I need to get to Croatia. Get me there, and it’ll be two I owe you. I’m good for it.”
“So, what? I look like a travel service?”
“I know you have a boat going across the Adriatic out of Bari every night.”
“Lots of boats do that trip.”
“Not like yours. I’ll pay you, once I’m on the other side.”
“I don’t need your money.”
“Just my blood?”
“A deal’s a deal.”
“Evidently,” Walker said, looking around, the surrounding landscape mostly concrete and blinding in the day’s full sun. “I need to be on a boat tonight.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
Walker breathed deeply. “Andretti, you’re a smart businessman. Make me a deal.”
“So you can run off on it again?”
“No. Give me something, whatever job you need done: I’ll do it, but I get on the boat tonight.”
“Fine. Do a Tunisia run.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow.”
“No can do.”
“Then we have no deal.”
Walker moved a few paces away, looking around at the boats. This place was teeming with smugglers, going back and forth all over the Med. Andretti’s Croatia run was a squid boat; Walker had done it a few times, though the real cargo being run between Croatia was vast quantities of stolen goods courtesy of local mafia. All manner of stuff came back on the return voyage: drugs, prostitutes, illegal immigrants. Whatever needed to be transported, Andretti had a boat and cover to do it.
“You must be desperate,” Andretti said, lighting up a cigarette.
“I am.”
“Trouble with the law?”
“Something like that.”
“You always were mysterious . . .”
“No more than you.”
“Tell you what,” Andretti said, blowing smoke at Walker. “I’ve got an old debt that needs collecting. You do that for me, you get your boat ride tonight.”
“Where?”
“In town.”
“How old’s the debt?”
“Just a couple of days.”
“It’s not like you to let money slide. Why haven’t you got someone else doing it?”
“I would have, but the local boys I use have been busy.”
“My lucky day.”
“If you say so.”
“How long will it take?”
“A guy like you: an hour.”
“If I do this, you get me onto your fastest boat out of Bari.”
“Deal.”
Fifty-three hours to deadline.
•
“CIA was a whole load of BS,” Hutchinson said into his cell phone.
“You expected something different from those guys?” McCorkell replied.
“I guess not. Jack Heller’s a jerk.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Gave me the runaround, told me zip about Walker, said to leave Durant be.”
“Durant?”
“Walker’s CIA buddy, and a surviving witness to what was said at the safe house. Other than that, he was talking about going private.”
“Heller?”
“Yep.”
“No great loss to national security. Hell, you should have told him to go work for Bellamy.”
“Yeah. They’d fit well together,” Hutchinson replied, and then spent the next five minutes while he was driving out of Virginia updating his boss on all he’d learned about Walker from the Agency.
“So, you’re no clearer about Walker’s motives?” McCorkell asked.
“Nope. My read was that Baer was full of praise for the guy, while Heller was full of envy. Neither seemed aware that he was alive until the last twenty-four hours. And Heller seems content to let the FBI handle bringing him home.”
“Yeah, well, it’s not going to be that easy,” McCorkell said, then explained the bomb blast that disabled Somerville’s car and killed a DSS agent.
“So, Walker’s gone, again?”
“Yep,” asked McCorkell. “I’m gonna go now and see Somerville, see if she wants to do a Marvel team-up. What’s next for you?”
“Walker’s wife,” replied Hutchinson. “Maybe she knows she hasn’t been a widow this whole time.”
•
Walker looked at the strip of shops in front of him. The street was like so many in this part of town, adjoining stone buildings with tiled roofs that could have belonged anywhere around the Med. He was in a northern district called Secondigliano, an old farming town that was swallowed by the city and evolved into one of Europe’s largest open-air drug markets and a working-class stronghold for their mafia, the Camorra.
This street was full of tiny no-name bars that catered only to those who knew the owners, where cards were played and money was made and lost by everyone from simple fishermen to those who plied their trade in Naples’ seedier side o
f life. Between some of the bars were workshops, the fronts of which sold handbags and sunglasses; for those brave enough to go inside, the better counterfeit stuff was for sale; and for those willing to pay a premium, the really good stuff would be delivered on the back of a motorbike.
Scooters and motorbikes were lined along the footpath, the road just wide enough to navigate through. The place was packed with young guys, gangly and with greasy hair and dirty looks, in T-shirts, jeans and leather jackets. For those working this street and so many others like it, crime was a generational thing, in their blood, all they knew. Most of the kids would be armed, Walker knew. None of the bikes and scooters had legible license plates. Italy 2.0.
Walker moved as he always did in such places: like a guy who belonged, and was not to be messed with, at least not by the lower-tier kids. He passed over a patch of dried blood on the road, a day old. Maybe the result of a collision, but more likely a stabbing or shooting over some bullshit turf quarrel. The police wouldn’t bother to identify the assailants, but the Camorra would. Street justice would be done. Perhaps it already had been. In Naples murder was a language that all understood, while silence under questioning was a birthright; police and the judicial system had little sway here.
Walker found number 42 and entered, no hesitation. The inside of the shop smelled of old cigarettes, bad cologne, stale coffee and cheap red wine. The space was filled by four small tables, and along the side walls sat bench seats that had probably been church pews once. The front of the store was glazed but most of the clear glass had been painted over with white paint. At the back was a closed door.
Four guys sat around one of the tables, playing cards. Walker pulled a chair up to the table and spun it around, straddling it, his forearms resting on the table.
All four guys stopped playing and looked at him like he had just dumped a turd right in the middle of their card game.
They were maybe five years older than Walker. Guys who had risen from doing street work to running their own small gangs. Mid-level management in the extortion, protection, narcotics and counterfeit-goods trade.
“Hey, what’s up?” Walker said. They seemed surprised that he was American. “I’m looking for someone.”
“You have the wrong place,” the guy to his left said. “Leave.”
Walker stared him down.
“Who would you be looking for?” the guy to his right said. Walker pegged him as his man, and he was surely the leader here, what with the pile of cash in front of him; these other guys would be letting him win. He was around forty, balding, yet his arms and the back of his hands were as hairy as any primate Walker had ever seen.
“You, evidently,” Walker said. “Dom Fontana.”
The guy opposite Walker pulled a pistol and clunked it down on the table. An old .22 that looked like it had never been cleaned. Walker could probably have leaned across and reached it before the other guy knew what was happening, but he felt safer without it.
Dom Fontana said, “What the fuck you want, Americaaan?”
“I’m here on behalf of Signor Andretti,” Walker said. “Collecting.”
There was dead silence around the table. Blank stares.
Walker said, “Look, Dom . . . Can I call you Dom? We’re all grown-ups here. We’ve all been around. We all know how this works. Let’s just be quick about it, yeah?”
Fontana smiled, stood, left the table and retrieved a black rucksack from behind a makeshift bar.
“This is what Andretti wants,” he said, dumping the bag in the middle of the table and sitting back down. “But I must tell you, unless he comes here to this table and negotiates a better deal for the future, my future, he’s never going to get it.”
Blank stares continued around the table.
Walker knew that these four hadn’t been in a serious fight for probably ten years. They had others to do it for them, and even before that they were always part of a brotherhood, and that offered a degree of protection against the kind of street fights that are anything more than a little warning shot from a rival group. A bit of a slap around here and there, maybe occasionally shooting a blindfolded and tied-down guy in the back of the head to show their boys that they still had it, but that was the extent of the last decade of hands-on involvement for the guys around this table. It had been a long time, if ever, since any of these muppets had partaken of a do-or-die tussle. Too bad.
The gun was unfortunate, though. The .22 round, while tiny in stopping power, did have good penetration, even when fired from a pistol. So, using the body of one of the guys either side of him as a shield was not a great option.
“I’m not leaving without that bag,” Walker said, his voice even and calm. “And I’m on the clock.”
“Then we have a problem,” Fontana replied.
“I’ve got about ninety-nine problems,” Walker said, “but you ain’t one of them.”
The guy to Walker’s left drew a thin stabbing blade. While he was quicker than Walker expected, he was an amateur through and through. In one motion Walker stood, reached left and wrapped his arm around the neck of the knife man, leaning back and twisting, feeling and hearing the vertebrae snap loose and the weight of the head heft forward.
The body was still falling when Walker moved to the next guy.
Fontana was up from the table and took a step back, while the gunman reached forward and brought up the pistol in a two-handed aim.
Walker kicked the table up at him and charged; the guy’s arms and hands and pistol were forced straight up toward the ceiling and a round pinged off with the pathetic PANG! of the tiny caliber. Walker grabbed the guy’s right wrist, the index finger still in the trigger guard, and pulled it down as the guy to his left charged. Another shot rang out, this time into the rushing guy, boring a hole clean through his shoulder and sending him howling around the room.
Walker buried an elbow into the gunman’s face and sidestepped, twisting his body and getting a good, solid stance. Still holding onto the pistol hand, Walker picked him up and flipped him flat onto the ground, where his head cracked onto the hard tiled surface. Walker picked up the pistol and field stripped it to pieces with little more than a clap of his hands.
“This,” Walker said to Fontana, picking up the rucksack, “is what I’m taking. You want to try to stop me, there will be no more gambling days in your future.”
Fontana nodded.
Walker slung the rucksack over his shoulder and left the shop, wary as he walked up the street and rounded the corner, where he paid a kid on an old Honda 250cc to give him a lift to the docks.
Walker checked his watch as they wound through the traffic.
Fifty-two hours to deadline.
•
“Tell me what’s happening in two days,” Senator Anderson said.
Bellamy leaned back in his office, his hand tight on the phone.
“You’ve never wanted to know before,” Bellamy replied. “All these years, you’ve never wanted details of an operation.”
“Well, I’ve got—we’ve got—too much riding on this one.”
“I need you to trust me.”
Anderson paused, his breathing steady but deliberate on the other end of the line.
“I’m not going to tell you,” Bellamy said carefully. “For all kinds of reasons.”
“In person then.”
“No. You do what you do, I do what I do, and never the twain shall meet.”
“But the President will never—”
Bellamy interrupted, said, “I know, so forget the President for now. The Vice President will get the NSC to budge, if you’re patient.”
“There’s no more time for patience,” Anderson replied.
“When I see the VP in New York, he’ll learn a new urgency.”
“Urgency or not, one man is not going to change the administration’s view on letting INTFOR off the leash. The Snowden fiasco, Walker’s father—they’ve been too spooked to outsource more of the intel world, even to us.”
“Off the leash?” Bellamy said. “I prefer to think that we are achieving our aims and being rewarded accordingly. And besides, I think you’ll be surprised by what one man can do . . .”
36
“You’ll be fine,” the embassy doctor said. “Take it easy for the rest of the day. Or at least try to avoid jumping from a moving vehicle and close proximity to bomb blasts.”
“Thanks, Doc,” Fiona Somerville replied, a small piece of gauze plastered to the graze on her forehead and the heel of her right hand. “I’ll do my best.”
“Knock, knock,” Bill McCorkell said, standing in the open doorway after the doctor departed.
“Yeah?” Somerville said, sitting up from the bed and slipping her feet into her shoes.
“Bill McCorkell,” he said. “Do you mind if I come in?”
“McCorkell?” Somerville did a double-take. “You were NSA to the President,” she said, not hiding her surprise to see him standing before her.
“Three presidents, though one of them rarely heeded my advice.”
Somerville stood and shook his hand a little gingerly because of her wound. “That’s pretty much my dream job,” she said.
“It made me gray. Then balding. Then a heart thing.”
“So, be careful what you wish for?”
“Nah. I like me a gray, balding woman with a weak heart.”
Somerville smiled. “You’re here for . . .”
“Walker.”
“Oh?”
“How about I buy you a cup of coffee,” McCorkell said, “and we compare notes?”
•
Walker found Andretti in what passed as his office: the back of a Fiat van. From the outside the faded blue paint gave the impression of just another delivery vehicle used around the docks for small jobs. Inside, the rear was carpeted and housed a reclining chair, a small table and plenty of paperwork.
“Quite the paper trail for a crook,” Walker said, dumping the rucksack on the floor. He leaned half in and half out of the van, not wanting to get comfy, not wanting to linger. “I’m ready for my ride to Bari, and then the boat.”
“A crook, you say . . .” Andretti said, checking the contents of the bag and seeming pleased. “I’ll let you get away with that one. Besides, I hate computers, and with the amount of gear I handle across this little sea, if I don’t have things written down I wouldn’t know if I were being ripped off by my contacts or not.”